Although the title is somewhat dramatic, I must admit that I found this experiment to be honestly challenging. And I do mean experiment…I was inspired by issue one of this semester’s Crier when I read Owen Bland’s article “The 22 Days you didn’t know you had,” where he broke down the amount of time we lose ourselves to the screen, and argued how phone overuse is harmful to humanity. I challenged myself to ten days without social media, ten days without news updates, and ten days with YouTube and games. My rules were simple: limited phone use only for brief calls or texts, and getting news solely from conversations or newspapers—“kicking it back to the old days.” For news, I relied on the Crier and the Stall Street Journal in the Geisel Library bathrooms. Schoolwork was allowed, but the computer was strictly for academics. This might seem childish, but in today’s world, it’s a tough challenge, and I encourage anyone reading this to try it and see if they can. Forgive me for most likely bastardizing the plot of Brave New World, but I felt like “John the Savage.” Even on the first day, I felt an instinct-like urge to grab my phone and drift to YouTube, or Instagram, or even Chess.com. (Mind you, I locked all of my apps and moved them off the front page on my phone.) Like a two-year-old without my iPad, I felt a sense of longing to have what I didn’t have, a consumption bred into me from prior to my memories. It saddens me to say that our phones have become a part of our essence, our being, our lives. Also, a spoiler alert. It was very difficult to be in the “old world” while being aware of the new one, the digital one. The old world, of course, being the times before this stage of advanced technology, the abandoned islands of the banished, isolated from the rest of the world and the very concept of knowledge. Never underappreciate your powers to Google Search. A fear of missing out is a good way to contextualize this point. But I, like John, was an outsider to both of these worlds; not able to function in the old, but not able to participate in the new. My brain, as I’m sure is true for most of humanity, has become ingrained in technology, even molded by it. To be honest, it felt like what I imagine going off drugs feels like, an addictive nature to humanity. And relating to Brave New World, the phone is Soma, the drug used to passify, immobilize, and intoxicate the members of this society. My girlfriend, Evangeline Rockwell, Class of ‘25, made an interesting point that has stuck with me, “As we’ve technologically improved and put into place systems to make life ‘easier,’ it has made it more difficult for us to do things that are what make us human.” This I would agree and argue is one of the main themes within Brave New World. Aldous Huxley seems to make a point that the complexity of technology will eventually, if not rapidly, overwhelm and control humanity, the very definition of humanity, even. And phones, like Soma, will lead humanity to embrace this mental slavery with open arms. I had “phone withdrawals” to say the least. Like John, I felt a desperate sense of longing to return to a world that I once belonged to. But how does this relate to propaganda? When in this state, I had no way of deciphering or processing between links of information. I was very susceptible to propaganda and misinformation, the juxtaposed state of the Brave Tech World we live in. Phones and social media are tools for information retention, but it is how we use this retention that is important to gaining authenticity in what we perceive. I was disabled from this verifiable retention, which made everyday life difficult without being able to access short-term validation and entertainment, while also receiving verbal news with no way to effectively verify or validate. The danger here is that we have entered a space of reality where the only way to receive information is the same place where we become addicted to media. Does anyone else find it alarming that the only way we can access information is owned and operated by people who want to control us? I was very bored without my phone, but what does that mean? What even is boredom now? I hear stories of my grandparents and parents, and their stories of adventure, imagination, and creativity. The humans of yesteryear shaped the world they saw with their hands. Is it because something was different about them, or was it because they didn’t have access to technology yet, like we do? Is boredom manufactured, or is it an active mindset? I think the answer to both is yes. Short-term validation is a chronic disease, and we let it infect us. We step directly into our own mental prisons. This makes me wonder if humanity was always destined to be like this, or did something go wrong in our society. Was Soma lying in wait, waiting for someone to use it on humanity? In “Breaking Bread with the Dead,” Alan Jacobs argues that social media disrupts our inner peace by narrowing our “temporal bandwidth”—our ability to engage meaningfully with the past and the future—while also emphasizing the value of finding authentic insight through reflective learning. By preventing myself from using social media and my phone, I forced myself to be bored, to increase my temporal bandwidth by thinking and pondering on important things like what does it mean to be a human, still trying to figure that out, and not on what videos do I need to watch, what thing I needed to do, what person I needed to “connect” with. I saw the beauty of the sky more. I looked at nature, and things that I should pay more attention to. Lastly, I learned how to process my boredom. I read for fun again, I wrote more poetry, I picked up my guitar finally, and I prepared to start writing this. But it took a “sacrifice.” I noticed how much the phone dulls my awareness of myself and the world. I am not Catholic, but taking these ten days has taught me a lot about the power of human dignity and the value of observing the natural world and its beauty. Phones are useful, but that’s all they are, and all they will ever be. They can’t teach us how to talk, how to think, how to love, or how to be. Like primordial humanity, that is for us to figure out in our own exploratory, human ways. I suspect that with Artificial Intelligence’s advancement, the disregard for the environment, and the apathy towards humanity, things will get worse before they get better. But know that if you see as I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek that I seek, then I ask you to join me on this quest to restore humanity to humanity.